New Year, New Books. Celebrate!

The Millions has up a long list of stuff to anticipate this year. I fairly drooled reading through it; in particular I’m looking forward to newness from Karen Russell, Jim Shepard, China Mieville, Bonnie Jo Campbell, and Nicholson Baker, along with the first English translation of Perec’s The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise.

What about you? What on this list (or not on this list) are you dying to get your eyeballs on?

Amber Sparks's work has been featured or is forthcoming in various places, including New York Tyrant, Unsaid, Gargoyle, Annalemma and PANK. She is also the fiction editor at Emprise Review, and lives in Washington, DC with a husband and two beasts.

8 thoughts on “New Year, New Books. Celebrate!”

Not sure why Rikki Ducornet’s Netsuke is not on their list, but I’m certainly looking forward to reading it (it’s on my shelf now).

I am excited to see that there will be two books by Alexander Theroux, a thoroughly under-appreciated writer, to say the least. I can’t wait to see what this stunning mind has to say about Edward Gorey and Estonia.

I’m sincerely hoping that David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King will not tarnish the legacy of this giant.

Roberto Bolaño’s Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches 1998-2003, with its cross-genre elements, sounds like a mind-bender.

I’ve read a number (four or so) of J.M.G. Le Clezio’s books, all of which I’ve enjoyed, so his short story collection, Mondo and Other Stories, looks like something I’d read.

Oh, I’ve got to have Gertrude Stein’s To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays.

I really like Jesse Ball’s work, so I’m looking forward to The Curfew.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (I’ve read most of his books) is certainly on the list of must-reads.

I want to interview Theroux. He’s like a throwback, and I mean that in the most positive, almost atavistic sense.

Since I liked everything I’d read from Murakami, that is, almost all of the fiction, I’d say just start from the beginning. Though, most people would probably say to start with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Norwegian Wood, admittedly two excellent novels.

One that’s missing is AGNI fiction editor’s William Giraldi’s Busy Monsters. I got to hear him read the opening chapter a few months ago…it’s both wonderfully language-drenched and character-driven, in addition to being a self-referential quest that, from the sound of it, becomes a sort of narrative perpetual motion machine as it proceeds.

Another one I’m looking forward to is Rebecca Makkai’s The Borrower. She was a classmate of mine in grad school, and I’ve dug her stories in BASS for the past three years, especially “The Worst You Ever Feel” in the Salman Rushdie-edited number.

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